Stucco & Masonry Repair In Orlando, FL

Not every crack means trouble. Fine hairline cracking under about a sixteenth of an inch, spread evenly across a wall, is usually shrinkage from the stucco curing. It is cosmetic, and it is common on newer builds in their first couple of years.

What we look at harder are diagonal cracks running out of window and door corners, cracks that have opened wide enough to catch a fingernail, and stair step cracks that zigzag along the mortar joints in a block wall. Those follow stress, not shrinkage. Long unbroken wall runs with no control joints crack for the same reason: the stucco has nowhere to move, so it relieves itself wherever it is weakest.

Before we patch anything we check whether the crack has been letting water in. Sound the wall for hollow areas, look for staining or blistering inside, check the drywall at the base of the wall. Filling a wet crack with caulk and painting over it seals the moisture in and the wall keeps rotting behind a nice new finish. We repair to the source, then rebuild the coat.

Remediation is a different job from patching. Patching addresses the finish. Remediation means the water barrier behind the stucco has failed and the assembly has to come apart.

On frame walls the stucco sits on lath over a weather resistant barrier, and that barrier is what actually keeps the house dry. Wind driven rain during a Florida afternoon storm does not fall on a wall, it hits it sideways at pressure. It finds the gaps: window flanges that were never properly flashed, hose bibs, light fixtures, dryer vents, the band joint between floors, and the roof to wall intersection where a kickout flashing should have been installed and often was not.

Once water is behind the stucco it has no fast way out. It sits against the sheathing and the framing. We usually find it as soft drywall inside, a musty smell, peeling paint low on the wall, or white powdery deposits on the block. That white bloom is efflorescence, and it means water has been traveling through the masonry and leaving salts behind on its way out.

Our remediation work involves removing stucco back to sound material, replacing damaged sheathing and framing, installing a proper drainage plane with correctly lapped flashing at every penetration, and re lathing before we re coat. It costs more than a patch. It also stops the problem instead of hiding it for two years.

EIFS is not stucco, even though people call it synthetic stucco and it looks similar from the driveway. It is foam insulation board with a thin acrylic finish over a mesh base coat. Tap it and it sounds hollow and soft. Real hard coat stucco over block sounds solid.

The distinction matters because older barrier style EIFS has no drainage layer. Any water that gets past the sealant joints has nowhere to go, and it will sit against the sheathing indefinitely. Newer drainable EIFS solved this with a drainage plane behind the foam, but plenty of Orlando homes built in the late nineties and early two thousands still have the original barrier system.

We probe EIFS with a moisture meter before quoting anything, particularly around windows, at the base of walls, under decks and at any spot where a roof edge meets a wall. Sometimes the finding is a failed sealant joint we can cut out and redo. Sometimes the foam is saturated over a wide area and needs to come off. We will tell you which one you are looking at before you commit to a scope.

Lake Nona and Laureate Park are mostly newer construction, which brings a specific set of problems. Fresh block absorbs water, the stucco cures fast in Florida heat, and on a lot of these homes the elevations were built with long flat wall planes and minimal architectural relief. That means large uninterrupted stucco fields and a lot of hairline map cracking within the first few years.

Restoration on these houses is usually less about structure and more about finish. We fill and bridge the crack pattern, match the existing texture, and then coat with an elastomeric product that can stretch across future movement instead of splitting over it. The order matters. Rolling elastomeric over open cracks without prepping them first traps moisture behind a waterproof skin, which is one of the more common mistakes we get called in to undo.

Matching texture on a partial repair is the part homeowners notice most. Knockdown, sand, dash and lace finishes all have to be worked by hand to blend, and the sample has to be tested on the actual wall in the actual light before we commit to the elevation.